The Adventures of Will and Conscience, Part 1

Read today's MUFHH; this is some exciting stuff.

Chambers says, "When the Lord is presented to the conscience, the first thing the conscience does is to rouse the will, and the will always agrees with God. You say--'But I do not know whether my will is in agreement with God."*

If you're like me, you might have a little trouble wrapping your mind around that sentence at first. So, it helped to picture it as an actual introduction. For our purposes, let's pretend someone knocks on the door of your house (or dorm room or apartment). Also, let's pretend that your conscience is a person and lives in your house. Their name is Conscience (I know, that's not very creative, is it?) Oh...also, your will also lives there and his name is Will (that one makes a little more sense but still isn't very creative). Here goes, Chambers' words in story form:

A knock at your door. Conscience opens it, as usual. And you, as usual, are busy doing something else. But you wonder who it is. Conscience is about to find out.

"Hello, Conscience. I AM."

"Woh!," Conscience thinks. She's unsure what to do. Her legs are like Jell-O and her heart comes into her throat. She feels like a little kid, nervous and excited at the same time about an important visitor. "I know," she goes on thinking, "I'll get Will." Conscience runs off to get Will. (She never did have good manners and has left your guest standing at the door momentarily). She knocks on Will's door. "Will!...Will! You're not gonna believe this..."

"He must be asleep," Conscience thinks to herself. "Will! Wake up. Someone's at the door." Will is roused from his nap. He opens the door, tieing the cloth belt around his robe and then rubbing his sleepy eyes awake. Conscience explains the situation: "Someone's at the door for you!" She says it as if he should've been awake and waiting for this guest. Will decides not to respond to her tone of voice but rather her intent, and he follows her back to the door.

And this is where you enter the story. You were hard at work on something else, but couldn't help but hear Conscience as she knocked on Will's door and woke him up. You can't see who's standing at the door yet, but you see Will listening intently and nodding every now and again, as if he agrees with everything the visitor is saying.

"That's funny. I don't remember Will ever agreeing with me about anything, much less a stranger. Who could this be, that Will is going along with everything he says?"

+++

Again: "When the Lord is presented to the conscience, the first thing the conscience does is to rouse the will, and the will always agrees with God. You say--'But I do not know whether my will is in agreement with God."

When I read those words this morning, I got to the part that says, "...and the will always agrees with God." And I thought, "I don't know about that..." But, of course, Chambers anticipated that (as you can see from the rest of the quote). He goes on to say, "Look to Jesus and you will find that your will and your conscience are in agreement with Him every time. The thing in you which makes you say, 'I shan't' is something less profound than your will; it is perversity, or obstinacy, and they are never in agreement with God." And I thought about that, and I think that's true.

My will, when confronted by my Creator (!), when it meets the presence of the Living God living in me through the Holy Spirit, knows what needs to be done. To put it another way: We know--I know--what needs to be done because not only did God create us to know right from wrong, but also His Spirit is at work in the world, and within us as believers. And, just like Isaiah or Peter when in the presence of God (see Isaiah 6:5 or Luke 5:8), our wills--we ourselves--are undone.

But there is also something else, something "perverse and obstinant" (to use Chambers words) that is at work in us, trying to keep our conscience and our will from obeying God (see Romans 7:15-25 for a biblical description of what's going on here).

Not wanting to end on a note like that, this is only part one. This post is already getting lengthy, so I'm going to continue commentary on today's devotion from My Utmost for His Highest in the next post.

To be continued...

*Note: if this sounds a little different from the text at the link above, it's because I'm using the "old school" edition...not the official name for that edition, but it works.